Item Detail
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13334
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5
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0
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English
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Plural Wives and the Nineteenth-Century Mormon Marriage System : Manti, Utah, 1849-1910
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Indiana University
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Historical studies of the family have heretofore given little attention to the interaction of laws and religion, on the one hand, with individuals and families, on the other. The distinctiveness of nineteenth-century Utah law and Mormon doctrine on marriage and divorce make Mormon Utah particularly valuable for a study of such interaction. Within the nineteenth-century Mormon context, such interaction focuses on the impact laws and doctrines regarding polygamy had on the Mormon marriage system. This research encompassed not only the study of federal and territorial laws, court cases, and Mormon doctrine dealing with marriage and divorce. It also involved assessing their impact on marriage and divorce patterns of individuals, which was done by reconstructing these patterns among families of Manti, Utah, from 1849 until 1910. Reconstituting these families' experiences required linking individuals across a variety of records, including censuses, family group sheets prepared by descendants, cemetery records, church records, immigration indexes, and probate court records. This study concludes that both law and religious doctrine shaped the nineteenth-century Mormon marriage system, but that within the framework they provided the marriage and divorce patterns of individuals changed over time. As the relative number of plural marriages decreased over time, particularly after 1870, the mean marriage age for women rose and the age-specific marriage rates and proportion of women ever marrying declined. Although plural wives came disproportionately from economically disadvantaged women--those whose fathers were dead or not in Utah or who had been widowed or divorced--sufficient numbers of women continued to enter plural marriage until the 1880s so that the entire marriage market was affected. In addition, although courts and church leaders were lenient in granting divorces, the number of divorces granted diminished over time." [Author's abstract]
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Joseph Smith's Polygamy
Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-century Americans : A Mormon Example
Sesquicentennial Reflections : A Comparative View of Mormon and Gentile Women on the Westward Trail
Single Men in a Polygamous Society : Male Marriage Patterns in Manti, Utah
The Mormon History Association's Tanner Lectures : The First Twenty Years